Sheridan creak on their hinges. The plays of twenty, fifteen, ten years ago have “aged”! “Progress” has become of such celerity that the dramas of yesterday are “out of date”--before the second season begins! The principles of art have altered, and they alter afresh with the startling discoveries of each new batch of collegiate criticasters. Human nature has changed. The forces of the universe are different. The sun rises in the west and water runs uphill. Acting now is smooth, flexible, natural, fluent. Behold, we have made a new theatrical Heaven and Earth wherein dwelleth a NEW STYLE! It is lamentable that these ignorant, frivolous babblers of folly should be able to cite even one word from such an authority as David Belasco in support of their ridiculous pretensions: it is the more deplorable since, if he were brought to a serious consideration of his heedless assertions, he would certainly recant them. I am not able to believe, for example, that he would stigmatize Edwin Booth as a strutting exponent of exaggerated declamation,--an actor who could speak blank verse as if it were the language of nature, and always did so: an actor and manager, moreover, who did more than any other one person of the Theatre to make possible the career of many who followed him, including David Belasco. Nor can I believe that he would call Florence a spouter,--Florence, who was one of the most adroit and delicate of artists,--or deride such performances as John Nickinson’s _Haversack_, Blake’s _Geoffrey Dale_, and Burton’s _Cap’n Cuttle_ as specimens of flannel-mouthed melodramatic rant. Yet such were the actors to whose style the New York audience had been accustomed long before the time when Belasco declares that he brought an entirely new and improved style of acting to the Madison Square Theatre and thus,--by implication at least,--asserts that he reformed the Stage. Augustin Daly, who began theatrical management in New York, in 1869, when Belasco was a schoolboy of sixteen, in San Francisco, constrained the actors whom he employed to respect and emulate the best traditions of acting, and, while he never sought to establish a school of acting, insisted on _Hamlet’s_ right doctrine of “temperance” and “smoothness”; and when he carried his dramatic company to San Francisco, in 1875, at which time Belasco saw and studied performances that were there given by it, “The Evening Bulletin,” of that city, displeased by the delicate, refined, “_quiet_” acting which had charmed New York, thus testified: